Canada: As immigration booms, ethnic enclaves swell and segregate

More than 600 newcomers per day have arrived in Canada since 2006, and many of them have settled in neighbourhoods like Richmond, B.C. The once-quiet farming community on the south end of Vancouver is now home to North America’s second-largest Asian community — and Canada’s densest proportion of foreign-born residents. The city’s strip malls are a haven for dim sum. Richmond’s roads are replete with white delivery vans emblazoned with Chinese characters and massive 150-store Asian-friendly malls seemingly plucked right from downtown Shanghai.

While the Chinese who came to Canada in the opening days of Confederation settled into dense urban Chinatowns, recent Chinese immigrants now occupy large sprawling Chinalands: Large, self-contained and lined with restaurants and supermarkets offering the comforts of the old country. Indo-Canadians, South Asians and others can lay claim to similar booming settlements in the outskirts of Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto — and the resource-rich centres of the…